Model Predictive Control of Cascaded H-Bridge multilevel inverters

This paper presents a model predictive current control strategy for a multilevel cascaded inverter. A simple discrete model is used to predict the behavior of the system for each possible voltage vector generated by the inverter. The voltage vector that minimizes a cost function is selected and applied during a whole sampling interval. The cost function measures the load current error. Due to the large number of voltage vectors, voltage levels per phase and switching states in a multilevel cascaded inverter, high amount of calculations is needed in order to make predictions. This makes difficult the implementation of this control strategy in a standard control platform. A modified control strategy that considerably reduces the number of calculations is proposed and validated with simulation results using a cascaded H-Bridge multilevel inverter.